I suppose Europe used this weapon for many centuries. To get away from depressing circumstances at home, Europe’s younger sons sought escape from the frustrations of Europe, at the expense of more settled, more prosperous, and less turbulent societies.

Now North Korea threatens its neighbours with all the refugees that a North Koren collapse would unleash, thus taking away the threat to induce such collapse. This refugee threat counts for far more than some half-baked Bomb, which one well-aimed and properly baked bomb could take out in minutes.

Less deliberate, but just as depressing to a European (because on a massively bigger scale), is the way that “moderate” Muslims flee from rancid governmental nastiness and dispiriting economic lassitude in the regular Muslim countries, but bring with them the very Islamic memes that did so much to cause the misery they flee from. The non-separation of Church and State. The worship of the Koran, and the constant threat that not so moderate sons and grandsons will read it and actually take it seriously. The fact that when said sons and grandsons do go crazy, the Koran gives their “moderate” parents and grandparents no arguments against Islamo-craziness. Muslims may be overwhelmingly moderate in their lives and conduct, and in most of their opinions, but the most important things they say that they believe are not moderate. They have got to stop saying these things. Or, some of them, at least, should, at least, challenge them. And live to go on challenging.

Until “moderate” Muslims start explicitly criticising their wretched Prophet – “He may very well have said that, but that doesn’t make it right” – then Muslims, however moderate, constitute an offensive threat to any non-Muslim society into which the immigrate in numbers beyond trivial.

This was what I found so disappointing about Yasmin Alibhai-Brown when I listened to her arguing and conversing with Iain Dale, while I sat between them last Wednesday evening on 18DS TV.

Alibhai-Brown said a lot of incidental stuff that I agree with, like: immigrants tend to work harder than lazy fat stupid white men on welfare, and: London is a great city. But her central proposition was that terrorism is not the fault of moderate Muslims. Absolutely nothing to do with them. Yet: We are being blamed! Yes you are, and now I’m doing it again.

Now fair enough, Alibhai-Brown has said enough against the Islamo-nutters to provoke death threats from them, apparently, so good for her. But her argument is that Westerners who blame Islam - i.e. her and all her moderate, civilised Muslim friends - for the Islamo-craziness, have no case, and are as bad in their way as the Islamo-crazies. That was what she said.

Consider Alibhai-Brown’s argument against the burqa, the veil etc., and her reason, therefore, for siding with Jack Straw in the Great Veil Debate. She made much of the fact that Muhammed himself apparently didn’t insist on the veil. If the argument is only about the rights and wrongs of veil-wearing, then if you can sign The Prophet Muhammed up to your team, you are far better placed to win. But in so doing, you reinforce the proposition that Muslims should all continue to be ruled by the pronouncements of this long dead brute.

The really important moment will come when some “Muslim” says that even if Muhammed did favour the veil, so bloody what? If Muhammed was for it, then so much the worse for Muhammed. It’s still stupid and demeaning to women, and a piece of male chauvinist piggery. (If that’s what it is. It looks more like a trick to avoid being identified to me, like an IRA balaclava, and as such rather different. But that’s not my point here.)

The equivalent debate in the Cold War was when people started denouncing not just Stalin, for “betraying” Marxism-Leninism, but Marx and Lenin for having cooked up the evil brew in the first place, and acknowledging that Stalin did not betray Marxism-Leninism; he simply did it. That was when the writing was on the wall for the old USSR, and it began its long, slow struggle to get from barbaric mess to civilisation and civility. That was the ideological dagger to its heart.

Now it may be that Alibhai-Brown has said this kind of thing, that is to say its equivalent in her debate. I haven’t read everything she has written, to put it mildly. In fact, all I have to go on with this lady is what I hastily read when preparing to go on the inter-telly with her, and what she then said on the night. If she has taken a genuine swipe at the worship of Muhammed, then that really would count for something. That really would be to separate Muslim culture from Islamic worship. But she didn’t do this last Wednesday evening. Not a whiff of that.

There are obvious differences between the Islam-versus-The-Rest argument and the Communism-versus-Civilisation argument, such as the fact that whereas Marx and Lenin had no excuses for their disgustingness, Muhammed did have a very good excuse for being a bastard. He lived in the seventh century! Everybody did things the way he did, if they could, in those days! So hats off to Muhammed for writing a very effective success book, suited to the needs of its time. It’s bollocks of course. There is no God. Muhammed is not his Prophet. But saying that there was and you were was the kind of thing you said in those times, if you wanted to make friends and influence people, so that all your friends could then help you to subjugate or kill your enemies.

But worshipping all this bloodthirsty crap now is something else again. This is the current evil. And the moderate Muslim, the most impeccably well-behaved citizen of Western Europe, who would be personally horrified if the political arrangements that he or his forebears fled from were to spread to his new home, is all part of those arrangements spreading. Signing up to Islam, however sensible you think it may be, means worshipping everything in the Koran, whether you yourself read it or not. That means your crazy teenage son, when he’s looking for weapons to compete with you and to rule or ruin the world, reaching for the Koran. Only when the Koran is dethroned down to being a mere book, written a very long time ago by a very ambitious and aggressive bloke with an absurdly vivid imagination and lots of very gullible and belligerent followers, is this going to stop.

And at present, when it comes to this necessary process, “moderate” Muslims are not the solution; they are the problem.

One thing. At the beginning you say: “To get away from depressing circumstances at home, Europe’s younger sons sought escape from the frustrations of Europe, at the expense of more settled, more prosperous, and less turbulent societies. “

Did they? If so, when? Surely after the Industrial Revolution took off Europe was by far the most prosperous continent.

Oh, another thing. It seems to me that the greatest barrier to the emergence of moderate ex-Muslims is the ban on apostasy. How can we expect people to do sensible things when they run the risk of being killed for doing so?

That’s easy for an atheist to say (and I am one, I think). We don’t expect Christians to say “I don’t care that Jesus said x,y,z. He was wrong.” Why should we expect Muslims to do so? If they did, they wouldn’t be Muslims would they? No, all we can expect from muslims is that they contort their minds sufficiently to simultaneously be Muslims and yet also decent “Westerners”. Be it moderation, compromise, reinterpration or just good old-fashioned hypocrisy: it doesn’t matter how they do it, just that they do. But to ask them to explicitly deny their prophet’s teachings is to ask them to stop being Muslims.

I take your point that my use of the word “Muslim” to describe people who reject the religious tenets, as opposed to broader culture that they were raised with, was wrong. However, we now don’t have the right word, perhaps because if anyone says they are this, they risk death threats or worse.

My label for myself, in this respect, is: Church of England Atheist.

As to the tactics of the thing, it may be too much to expect Muslims to do everything I ask, but one of the principles of effective propaganda is to ask for everything you want. That way you are far more likely to get something than if you merely ask for something. I want “Muslims” - or whatever one calls people raised as Muslims but rejecting Islam’s demand to be submitted to - to dump the Koran as a commanding force in their lives. I want them to treat it the way I treat the Bible – interesting, often inspiring, a great story, but not the ruler of me. And I say so.

In a world filled with that opinion, claims that the Koran is nice and cuddly, and that non-cuddly Muslims betray the Koran, are far more likely to be asserted, vehemently and effectively, complete with assistance to the police in their investigations, if only because such an opinion will seem middle-of-the-road. I think that this compromise is woefully insufficient, and I will continue to regard the Koran as a ticking bomb, liable to detonate any excitable adolescents who read it and take its claims seriously. And I will continue to say that.

Posted by Brian Micklethwait on 16 October 2006

Framescourer

You assert that you disagree, but do not engage my argument. (Which is fair enough. You’re just saying. And so am I.)

The thing is, last Wednesday night I did hear an impeccably mainstream Muslim, namely Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and what she said was, in my opinion, a definite problem. What she does, how she lives, how she looks – absolutely not a problem, I agree with you about that, assuming you agree.

But it’s a two stage process I am objecting to. “Moderate” Muslims behave moderately, but use an immoderate book to justify this, thereby boosting its authority. Others therefore read this book, and do what it actually says. That’s a problem. Why do you think it isn’t?

I keep my ears open for these mainstream Muslims, but when I hear them all that they say is that Islam does not mean this or that (violence, suicide bombing, terrorism etc.). They sometimes quote the Koran, very unpersuasively. That the Koran should still rule their lives is not questioned. Maybe on the quiet they do question the authority of the Koran, but I have not heard this said out loud.

Oh, wrong, I do recall that there is definitely one Muslim-raised hundred-percent-proof atheist, who blogs, and he will surely know most of the others who have put their heads above the parapet. Anyone know the link? I want him on my blogroll. I read him a few months ago, but lost track.

Posted by Brian Micklethwait on 16 October 2006

Patrick

My understanding of the West versus the Rest is that only when the Industrial Revolution got seriously going, circa 1800, did the West get definitely richer. But Western impingement on the Rest definitely pre-dated the IR by some two to three centuries.

I had in mind the amazing plunder that East India company people brought back to England with them. That kind of thing.

Posted by Brian Micklethwait on 16 October 2006

And, to go back rather further. What about all those Spanish silver fleets, that Sir Francis Drake et al in their turn plundered?

Surely, to start with, the West only had the edge militarily and managerially, so to speak. They were not richer. Not at first.